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The Art of Cruelty A Reckoning Maggie Nelson W.W. Norton: 304 pp., $24.95 From a movie billboard in her Los Angeles neighborhood to the Italian Futurists, Maggie Nelson swings her lively gaze across a century's worth of art and culture in "The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning." The starting point for this study of violence and art is Antonin Artaud, the French playwright behind the "theatre of cruelty" who wrote that cruelty in art "signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination." Those ideas fascinate Nelson, but they don't hold sway over her; she often brings up Buddhist thinking as a counterpoint, and...

Related "John Cage" Articles

The Art of Cruelty
A Reckoning
Maggie Nelson
W.W. Norton: 304 pp., $24.95
From a movie billboard in her Los Angeles neighborhood to the Italian Futurists, Maggie Nelson swings her lively gaze across a century's worth of art and culture in "The...

Over more than a century, Dorothea Tanning collided and consorted with artistic titans of the 20th century who included Pablo Picasso, John Cage and Joseph Cornell. She designed sets for George Balanchine ballets, played romantic matchmaker for poet Andre...

John Cage was a leading avant-garde composer for 40 years, but he also made spare watercolors, drawings and prints, plus the occasional painting, especially in the final decades of his life. Infused with the same spirit that characterizes his work as a...

John Cage's ideas have long inspired artists inside and outside the experimental music subculture. Besides new-music figures considered disciples or associates — Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and David Tudor, for example — he had an...

What Jean-Luc Godard is to film and Marcel Duchamp was to the visual arts, John Cage was to music -- a radical experimentalist who constantly sought to reinvent the art form. Boldly conceptual -- and to many, frustratingly impenetrable -- his pieces stand...

Reinventing BachPaul ElieFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 498 pp., $30.00Halfway through reading Paul Elie's "Reinventing Bach," I suddenly got dizzy. An earthquake? All-purpose angst? Or could it be that Bach was working as an agent of...

Renowned choreographer Mark Morris will bring his signature modern sensibility to the Ojai Music Festival in June with a program that will feature pieces by Lou Harrison, John Cage and Henry Cowell.Organizers said Wednesday the Mark Morris Dance Group...

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is ...